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palladias comments on Change Contexts to Improve Arguments - Less Wrong
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Well, I somewhat strongly disagree (will I get cookies now?).
Assuming a similar amount of information is exchanged*, introducing strong social conventions will overshadow the arguments and skew their results. Probably without the participants even noticing. Being on someone's home turf, being served food, the ballast of thousands of years of social evolution, all of these are detractors from factual debate. Yes, the experience will be more amenable, filled with polite "Aaaah, I see what you mean!" interjections, and everyone will leave fuzzily happy, well fed, socially status-affirmed and postprandially somnolent. Quirrell would approve, as the cookie-dispensing host. But when looking for the correct -- even if unpopular -- deduction?
There's a reason I have more respect for people who implicitly embrace Crocker's Rules, having no need for being cuddled, especially when such cuddles will (in my opinion) inevitably sway the course of the arguments.
When you're invited to debate a couple of friendly Jehova's Witnesses (See me adhering to online social conventions? In fact, any religion could be inserted here.) over some tea and cookies, and everybody leaves fuzzily happy thinking "what a great exchange!", you did something wrong. If truth was your objective, that is.
* (otherwise the medium allowing for more exchange mostly wins by default; a long series of Facebook exchanges would allow for more mutual updates than a short tete-a-tete)
Well, in my experience, we don't all arrive at consensus, just because we start by liking each other more. This was the discussion where one of my friends said that disagreeing with Eich's resignation was the moral equivalent of endorsing genocide against gays (for a variety of slippery slope reasons that I don't feel the need to disentangle).
The main difference, as far as I could tell, is that we all heard his reasoning, rather than all jumping in right after his assertion, and got a better idea of the reasons of his belief and then could decide what arguments to marshal (or whether we wanted to let the most inflammatory statement dominate the topics we covered at all).
Basically, think of changing contexts as all along a spectrum. Probably it's a bad idea to have a discussion while pleasantly tipsy in a spa. And also a bad idea to have it while quickly tabbing back and forth between facebook and your work and hiding windows from your boss. My main point isn't that "Cookies" is always the right context, but that it's often worth not staying in the venue where your argument started.
Personally, I find that people are more likely to show me the soft underbelly of their beliefs if they're relaxed and in a situation where it's clearer I care about them (and easier for me to do the same thing). So I like creating contexts of warmth and trust, because it often means people are sharing their beliefs with me, excited to show me how they work, rather than just looking for weak points in mine. (and vice versa).
Depending on how close and dear someone's belief are to their own identity, a context of warmth and growth could work against going against a wrong belief full-bore. Especially when you notice how essential such a belief is to someone's identity. Like telling a child there's no Santa, to their face.
Probably the crux of our disagreement: Looking for weak points in your own and the interlocutor's belief is what you should be doing, with as few distractions as possible. (If correct beliefs were the overriding goal. Which, all protestations to the contrary aside, they mostly aren't.)
However, I totally get that there are often more important things than correcting someone else's wrong beliefs. Such as building shared experiences, creating a sense of community et coetera. Singing Kumbaya ;-).
I think you may be missing the point. It sounds to me like being more willing to look for weak points in your own arguments is exactly the kind of goal Leah has in mind for the change in context.
Well, this may be a subcultural distinction. In my circles, saying "Jeez oh man are you wrong, let's get coffee to discuss" is affectionate, but it doesn't mean people pull their punches over coffee. So fondness doesn't require soft-pedaling.
I find it easier to look for weak points when both people are enthused to take each other on a tour through their beliefs (ideological show and tell, basically). If the discussion feels really framed around "discover weak points" it's often harder for people to reveal them, because it feels like once they're spotted, you'll be laughed out of the argument. Alternatively, you can create a context where it's easier to say, "This is the part that I find a bit confusing myself, to be honest, though I still am relatively confident in my overall model. What would your model say about this sticky widget?"
You're treating looking for week points in your and the interlocutors belief as basically the same thing. That's almost the opposite of the truth, because there's a trade-off between those two things. If you're totally focused on the second thing, the first one is psychologically near impossible.